Our House Build - Waiting

Have been back and forth with the builders about getting a price for 3 phase power; apparently I needed permission from powercor and I emailed them a few weeks back (to a couple of different email addresses) - one response was to send off a form requesting a connection and they'll quote it (but it costs $500ish even for a rough estimate) and then I sorta gave up and late last week I got a phone call in response to the other email I sent; to say that the pits (we have underground power) have 3 phase available to it's as simple as the electrician emailing powercor before connecting and then it's all good - so I've gone back to the builder and asked for a price - it might mean we can run a larger AC unit for similar cost to the single phase unit we've been looking at, as well as potential to connect 3 phase machines in the shed (which can often be purchased very cheaply ex machining workshops via grays online)

It's much cheaper/easier to connect 3 phase at this point than later, as the whole house would need to be re-circuited to allow the load to be balanced on each phase (or so my understanding of the phone call from powercor goes) - adding it later would also mean we'd need to replace a single phase power meter with a 3 phase one, and replace single phase wiring to the shed sub board with 3 phase wiring.

So it's a bit of a waiting game now - waiting for the builder to give us the retaining wall engineering information so we can organise our site cut/fill, waiting for a final price for the HVAC, waiting for a price on 3 phase power, and waiting for all of that to combine to a final fixed price quote so we can apply for unconditional finance with the bank.

We've also had to re-order our birth certificates as we can't work out where we've put them. I'm sure they'll turn up when we're packing the contents of the house to move. We need the birth certificates to apply for the first home builders grant.



I swung by the block today (I do most days, mainly to make sure nobody is dumping any rubbish/concrete etc on our block) - this is the house over the road from us - construction fencing is down and it looks like it's going to be lightweight cladding all round perhaps? I don't mind the look of it; which is a good thing since 3 of our bedrooms will look at it when the foliage dies off the shade trees in winter! I was intially worried that since it is built up a fair way it might look a little imposing; it certainly doesn't look that way now.

The road continuation has been hotmixed and the formwork is down for the footpath - this is of particular interest because this is actually still out the front of our block - the white peg near the pipe cover/access 1/4 of the way down is actually the bottom corner of our block.

This is looking from that peg - you can see to the extreme right of the image two more pegs - the middle one is the dividing line between our two south side neighbouring properties - the furthest is the rear / south-east corner of our block.